CEO Naval Ravikat Says AI Fears Are Overblown | Joe Rogan

People who are talking about AI, automating programming, have never really written serious code. Coding is thinking. It's automating structure thinking. An AI that can program as well or better than humans is an AI that just took over the world. That's endgame. That's the end of the human species. And I can give you arguments why I don't think that's coming either. People who are thinking, and I know I take the opposite side from some very famous people in this debate, but we're nowhere near close to general AI. Not in our lifetimes. You don't have to worry about it. Even in our lifetimes. Really? It's so overblown. It's another... It's a combination of Cassandra complex. It's fun to talk about the end of the world combined with a God complex like people who have lost religion so they're looking for meaning in some kind of end of history. The reason why I don't think AI is coming anytime soon is because a lot of the advances in so-called AI today are what we call narrow AI. They're really pattern recognition. Machine learning to figure out what is that object on the screen or how do you find this signal and all of that noise. There is nothing approaching what we call creative thinking. To actually model general intelligence, you run into all kinds of problems. First, we don't know how the brain works at all. Number two, we've never even modeled a paramecium or an amoeba, let alone a human brain. Number three, there's this assumption that all of the computation is going at the cellular level at the neuron level, whereas nature is very parsimonious. It uses everything at its disposal. There's a lot of machinery inside the cell that is doing calculations, that is intelligent, that isn't accounted for. The best estimates are it would take 50 years or more's law before we can simulate what's going on inside a cell near perfectly and probably 100 years before we can build a brain that can simulate inside the cells. Looking at it saying that I'm just going to model a neuron as on or off and then use that to build a human brain is overly simplistic. Furthermore, I would posit there's no such thing as general intelligence. Every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in, so you have to evolve an environment around it. I think a lot of people who are peddling general AI, the burden of proof is on them. I haven't seen anything that would lead me to indicate we're approaching general AI. Instead, we're solving deterministic closed set finite problems using large amounts of data, but it's not sexy to talk about that. If you're talking about mirroring the actual abilities of cells, or are you talking about recreating the actual mechanism? What is going on inside cells and biological organisms? We just don't know how intelligence works. Right. We literally have no idea. Most of the AI approaches basically say we're going to try and model how the brain works, but they model at the neuron level, which is saying this neuron's on, that neuron's off, they're combining their signal. But I'm saying the neuron is a cell. Inside the cell, there's all this machinery going on that's operating the neuron that is also part of the intelligence apparatus. You can't just ignore that and abstract that out. You have to model it down to the inside the cell level. It's also a part of the biological organism itself. Exactly. And it has all these needs that the biological organism has to have food and rest and there's a balance going on. But when you eliminate all that, when there is none of that, and it's just calculations, and we get to a point where it's just this thing that we've created, whether you call it a computer, whether it doesn't have to be a moving thing even, but a thing that you've created that stores virtually all the information that's available in the world, stores all the patterns of all the thinking of all the great people that have ever lived, all the writers, all the people that have ever published anything, all the people that have ever spoken any words, stores all of their points, all of their counterpoints, all their contradictions, applies logic and reason and some sort of sense of the future and starts improving upon these patterns and then starts acting on its own based on the information that's been provided with. Well, first you would have to actually simulate a structure of the human brain that can hold all that information. You're basically talking about tens of thousands of brains worth of information. We can't even build one brain the next decade or two or three. Well in terms of an actual physical brain, yes. But what about something that recreates the abilities of a brain? Like I said, nature is parsimonious. So we've got this three pound wetware object that can hold all this data. Nature has been very efficient in evolving kind of how we get there. I just don't think computers are anywhere close to that. Like they can hold that amount of data with that complexity, with like the holographic structure of the brain where it can recall in many, many different ways. And then I don't think you can evolve a creature to be intelligent outside of the boundaries of feedback in a real medium. Like if you evolved, if you raised a human being a concrete cell with no input from the outside, they wouldn't have any feedback from the real world. They wouldn't evolve properly. So I think just dumping information into a thing isn't enough. It has to have an environment to operate in to get feedback from. It needs to have context. But isn't that biological? I mean if you have just all the information that people have accumulated and the lessons that people have learned and you program that into the computer. Like if we can take a computer that can beat someone at chess, the real question was, well can we make some sort of an artificial intelligence that can beat someone at Go, which is far more complex at chess. They figured out how to do that too. And that was a giant shock. Right? These are still man made very closed bounded games. They're not on the road to the unbounded game of life. They are completely artificial. But this didn't Go, didn't that give you like a little bit of a pause? A little bit. They're not Go or League of Legends or Fortnite. They're not completely deterministic. But they're still very artificial, very bounded games. Being good at Go doesn't mean that you can then suddenly figure out how to write great poetry. Right. The creativity for sure is something that's great. Creativity is the last frontier. So I do believe that automation over a long enough period of time will replace every non-creative job or every non-creative work. But that's great news. That means that all of our basic needs are taken care of. And what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants. Yeah. And what are you doing right now? This is a creative job. Sure.